John Dryden

The Academy gave Condoned a largely negative review, arguing that Steele had with the odd lack of judgment which not seldom distinguishes lady novelists, done nearly all she could to spoil her book.

Edmund Gosse wrote to congratulate JOH on The Serious Wooing, paying it the high compliment of calling it her new version of Dryden 's All For Love, as well as one of...

The reception of this volume, dictated by Gethin's position as her father's only child and heir, and as an exemplary pattern of female excellence, rather than by consideration of the literary quality of her work...

Congreve was twenty-one when on 22 December 1691 he licensed his first book, a short novel called Incognita: or, Love and Duty Reconcil'd, which was published the following year. He moved quickly into...

As to poetry, Paradise Lost was quickly recognised as a classic. In 1674, while it was still a very recent text, Dryden praised it as undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime...

AF was a constant source of scenes, burlesques, and improvisations for performance by the Women's Liberation Street Theatre Group . She also wrote for a number of underground or radical papers: Ink, Islington Gutter...

An amateur performance at Court of Dryden 's The Indian Emperor used a prologue which AB included in her Covent Garden Drolery, but probably did not write.

AK (also a painter) was a fine Restoration-period poet, who has the misfortune of being better known for Dryden 's praises of her than for her actual work.

ET (dubbed Corinna by Dryden and writing mostly in the early eighteenth century) was a poet of real stature and an interesting letter-writer. Her few authentic works have been upstaged by the many miscellaneous writings...

It is difficult to summarise AB 's immense and complex importance for the history of women's writing. Virginia Woolf said she deserved from all women a tribute of flowers because she was the first to...

In some sense, therefore, she dictated the terms of the anthology. Its full title was The Virgin Muse: Being a Collection of Poems from our Most Celebrated English Poets, designed for the use of...

This was not the first dictionary of English, but its predecessors had remained more or less close to the model of a word-list, omitting common words or any attempt to distinguish one idiomatic usage from...

An Argument explains the poem's source in Plutarch. AF 's hero, whose father was an associate of Alexander the Great , is dead after many vicissitudes. His ashes make a triumphal progress by sea from...

The novel ranges over Barbary, Persia, and Brazil, but centres on the career of Sebastian , sixteenth-century king of Portugal, who in died in Africa in 1578, fighting against the Moors...

MLC 's occasions include the public and private. She opens with an ode on the recent death of the queen's only surviving child , in which the speaker, unconventionally, rejects the consolation duly offered by...